The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), July 11, 2005, Monday

Copyright 2005 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved.
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)

July 11, 2005 Monday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B1


HEADLINE: WOMAN HAD HER DREAMS ON HOLD;
GERTRUDE DANZY, AN SU WORKER, AIMS TO END "CYCLE OF LOW-WAGE WORKERS."

BYLINE: By Molly Hennessy-Fiske Staff writer

BODY:
An underclass built America, carving out mountains and canals, laying railroad tiles and highways. Some were willing immigrants, many unwilling slaves and American Indians. The unwilling were first forced into hard labor, then jobs no one else would do, a long line of low-wage workers extending down through the generations to Gertrude Danzy, 54.
Danzy, a Syracuse University food handler, chops grapefruit in the kitchen at Graham Dining Center in Flint Hall as she traces her ancestral line. It's the reason she joined the unseenamerica New York State project, she says: "It connects the dots for me, the cycle of low-wage workers."
Danzy's father's side came to Syracuse from Virginia, "out of slavery" in 1901 to work on the Erie Canal. Her mother's family were Cherokees who fled an Oklahoma reservation. Her father worked making Syracuse China, her mother as a temporary laborer at Bristol Labs, Syracuse University housekeeping and a local nursing home.
Danzy has worked at SU for 11 years. She's a member of Service Employees International Union Local 200. She makes $10.20 per hour working 39 weeks of the year, plus health benefits.
She grew up "on every side of town except the north," graduating from Nottingham High School in 1969 full of dreams. She wanted to be a Broadway actress and dancer, or else a children's social worker, she says as she chops, a black apron draped over her front, a black hairnet over her hair. She wanted to see the world.
Instead she got a factory job, became pregnant at 18 and married her son's father. She changed her dream. She wanted her son, Desmond Williams, to go to college.
"Your goals are always changing, and that's OK as long as you have somewhere to start from," Danzy says.< She knew Desmond had to do more than succeed in classes at Corcoran High School. She urged him to get a newspaper route to learn responsibility. She took him to Pop Warner football practices. When she saw Desmond falling in with the wrong crowd, Danzy made a decision, "Probably one of the hardest things I had to do in my life."
She and her husband had divorced, and he was settled in Florida with a new wife. She sent her 16-year-old son to live with them.
Desmond Williams went on to graduate from Florida State University. At 35, he dispenses prescriptions for a health care company and lives in Tampa with his wife and three children. Once a year he flies his mother down to visit - a dream come true, she says:
"I feel he broke away from the cycle is what makes me proud of him."
For the unseenamerica New York State project, Danzy wrote about her son and her mother, Helen Tisdell, 73, whom she cared for at home for the past 18 years.
Watching and photographing her mother as she died of lung cancer without health insurance this spring forced Danzy to change her dreams again.
"Most all of us work low-wage jobs all of our lives," she wrote. "We work paycheck to paycheck. Never getting ahead. Some of us do not even have or can afford health care. Our parents become old and sick and end up in the hospital. Will there be someone to help them? Or are they alone?"
Danzy dreamed of financial stability.
She took financial management classes, started a retirement account with Smith Barney and a nest egg in case she got sick. In 1997, she bought a house on Syracuse's Southwest Side. She began taking classes, working on her labor studies certificate through Cornell University so that she could organize for a union or become a better local activist. In December, she quit smoking cold turkey. In April, soon after her mother died, Danzy decided, finally, to take "the trip of a lifetime."
Danzy won't be at the exhibit's opening reception July 21. A nephew and niece will read her poem "See Me," about her mother's struggle.
Wednesday, Danzy will travel thousands of miles from Syracuse, cruising the inside passage of Alaska with her sister. Seeing the world. Her childhood dream, deferred for so many years, is finally coming true.
< Other participants
James Adsit, retired, state taxation and finance department
Scott Brooks, sophomore at Liverpool High School
Linda Campbell, program coordinator, elderly services, Syracuse Housing Authority
Sharon Conner, secretary, Hutchings Psychiatric Center
Donna Cooney, special-education assistant, North Syracuse schools
Louise DeJohn, unemployed
Bonnie K. DiRenzo, chemical dependency counselor, Crouse Hospital
Vivian Green, mental health assistant, Hutchings Psychiatric Center
Helen Hudson, AFL-CIO community services liaison
Michael James, news video editor, WSTM (Channel 3)
John Kosecki, patient services assistant, Veterans Affairs Hospital
Roseanne Sabon, teacher, Porter Magnet School
Anna Sinclair, teacher aide, North Syracuse schools
George Smith, tractor-trailer driver
A closer look
The unseenamerica New York State project, an exhibit featuring photographs and writings of union workers, opens today at the Company Gallery. Sunday, The Post-Standard published the first of three profiles of workers who participated in the program.
Sunday: Thomas Brooks, letter carrier
Today: Gertrude Danzy, food handler at Syracuse University
Tuesday: Erica Harding, apprentice electrician
If you go
What: unseenamerica New York State Project's exhibit, featuring writings and photographs by union workers.
Where: Company Gallery, One Lincoln Center, 110 W. Fayette St., Syracuse
When: Opens today and runs through Aug. 3. Opening reception 6 to 9 p.m. July 21; artist readings, 7:30 p.m. You can check out the exhibit from noon to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 1 to 8 p.m. Saturday.